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. Unemployed people voted against unemployment protection. All in the believe that they are some kind of middle class that doesn't need any government protection from the super rich. The divide between rich and poor has never been so big and the poor are voting to increase the gap.

You can't blame them. Propaganda says that if they work hard, get an education (and more debt with that) and invest their money smart (does anyone actually think the super rich invest in those shit mutual funds you invest it or even those "small caps" that your newsletter points out every month?!?); they too can be rich.

Or the biggest one - anyone can be rich! Just start a business and a way you go!

As someone who's started a couple of businesses, I really wish that were true. It's really hard with all the competition out there (all computer services are saturated) and laws that benefit big business supported by the little people and written by lying politicians who say that the law will help small business.

Of course I'm now broke because I thought I could have the American dream - which was a lie.

Are you sure about this? I'm sure there was a much bigger difference between a king or duke in the Middle Ages who could order anyone's head chopped off at will, who could seize anyone's land, and who could basically do what he wanted, to people today.

Nowadays the "ultra rich" may be able to afford many homes and travel often. But unless they fly out of non commercial terminals, they still have to stand in the TSA line line everyone else. They can't kill anyone or have anyone killed. They can't drive drunk. No, all they have is "bigger" toys, but the POWER that comes with riches is gone - reserved by governments only.

So yeah, there might be more zeroes at the end of the net worth of rich people than there were before, but considering that "poor" people and "middle class" people usually have shelter, television, transport (private or public), food, etc, it's actually the poor who are better off than ever before.

The nice thing about governments when it comes to history buffs is that everyone is covering their ass all the time. They cover their ass by documenting what they were told to do when and by whom... otherwise they might someday be accountable for their own actions, or be accused of doing things on their own.

I do not have high confidence in the desire of government to be open, because government is made up of people and people do not like to be subject to scrutiny. That said, there is so much cover-your-ass (CYA) going on in government that there will always be a paper trail.

No, all they have is "bigger" toys, but the POWER that comes with riches is gone - reserved by governments only.

Unless you count their ability to "campaign finance" the legislation they want that benefits them and their business interests.

So yeah, there might be more zeroes at the end of the net worth of rich people than there were before, but considering that "poor" people and "middle class" people usually have shelter, television, transport (private or public), food, etc, it's actually the poor who are better off than ever before.

And more and more people have to work two or three jobs to keep those things, because the rich people are paying workers less and charging more for goods and services in order to keep adding those extra zeroes.

My Parents have a TV and hooked up to that TV is a computer. They use that computer to stream in movies. Not from Netflix or anything. Just those websites. I knew it would happen sooner or later, they got a nasty virus, I had to go and clean it up. Since I had the drive mounted to another computer in the back room while doing the scan, they had the news on. Of course a little blurb about Wikileaks comes on.

My mom says something along the lines of "oooh, you shouldn't visit that site!" To my father. What spurred this comment I couldn't quite tell. So I poke myself out of the back room, the scan was started and it would be a while before it was finished anyways. So I pondered. Then I queried "Why would you say that?". She paused, and looked at me. I couldn't quite tell if she had answer ready, so in order to give her time and keep us from an awkward silence I say "Well, I am actually quite informed of the whole situation, but I don't watch the news with any regularity, so I'm just curious what the public opinion is on the situation. Don't worry I'm not going to lecture you or anything."

To which she slowly spilled, "Well, I don't know anything about the site really. But I know that whenever a site makes it in the news like that, its a target for virus writers to try and put their code on the site and infect a lot of users."

Which is kind of something I told her earlier, about how people will try and inject malicious code onto an actually innocent website, but I could tell my laymen explanation of it wasn't quite technical enough for her to actually grasp how it works.

I wanted to respond to her silly logic, because she still visits Facebook, CNN.com, Yahoo, MSN - whatever, and there's no more assurance those sites will be safer than Wikileaks, but I just let my mom believe whatever it is she wants to believe.

It could have been full well that she doesn't like what Wikileaks is doing, or Julian Assange, or something else, but didn't want to get into a debate with me.

In any event, my anecdotal evidence is that the negative light the media shows on wikileaks is working on the average joes of North America.

Perhaps this is a solid reminder that we are becoming too reliant on 'domain names' and not doing enough to track and keep actual IP addresses. Perhaps it's time for a review of some of our habits, bookmarking, browsing history and, address finding

Sounds like what we need is a browser plugin that logs the IP of a website when bookmarked, or perhaps even in history, along with the name.

In future requests, it could only lookup DNS to check for changes, and prompt for action (update or not)

If the domain ever disappears, it could use the IP from the log to reach the site, and the original domain name to send as a Host: header (For virtual hosts where just using the IP alone won't get you to the right website)